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Life
THE END OF AN ERA
cm-life.com
MONDAY, NOV. 4, 2013 | MOUNT PLEASANT, MICH. | ISSUE NO. 31 VOL. 95
Soccer season ends as women suffer heartbreaking 2-1 loss »PAGE 1B
UNIVERSITY
SGA
Nursing program no sure bet
Reps could be removed from top A-Senate committee
By Ben Solis Staff Reporter
As university officials weigh the possibility of building a nursing program to boost enrollment, other area colleges that host similar programs have weighed in with mixed feedback. Saginaw Valley State University’s Dean of Health and Human Services Judith Ruland is worried a nursing program at CMU might upset a statewide balance for clinical training. “I don’t know how this would work,” Ruland said. “Part of the issue is delicately balancing the number of nurses we need to produce to serve our population. At the same time, we have to think about not overtaxing our clinical patients in the hospitals. I’m a big proponent of increasing capacity, and it’s not that we’re not supportive, but one more nursing school in the area could really upset that balance.” Strong words like those characterize the kinds of internal and external challenges that lay in wait for a CMU nursing program. Everything from available facilities, massive Chris Ingersoll start-up and maintenance costs, and a lack of faculty available top the bill for Ruland, who has expressed her concerns through conversations with CMU’s Chris Ingersoll, dean of health professions and human services. “These are all things I’ve spoken with Chris about,” Ruland said. “Nursing programs are very expensive to run, and they take a lot of resources to operate. Our program is built heavily with simulation as a part of the curriculum, and we require four hours of simulation every week. Aside from those physical resources, having staff to run that lab or faculty that are prepared by specialty is key. You can’t start off small.” In order to maintain its program, Ruland has 17 full time faculty members and nearly 90 clinical instruction faculty and staff members. Each faculty member, she said, must be highly specialized and highly trained. Finding that kind of faculty base was one of her biggest challenges. “It took me a few years to put together the necessary amount of faculty,” Ruland said. “The people who work in the clinical setting need to be at least bachelor’s or master’s prepped, and we need at least one faculty member to eight students at all times. We have a huge need for our student population, coupled by a terrible shortage of these available faculty.” w NURSING | 2A
Life inside Gone Beachin’ clothing company inspired by Florida beaches »PAGE 3A
Advocates fight to reform Michigan recycling regulations »PAGE 6A Field hockey loses in double overtime to end regular season »PAGE 4B
ALL NEW
By Nathan Clark & Ben Solis Staff Reporters
THE PILL
PROBLEM
Common prescription drugs are being used and abused by students, residents Megan Pacer
Senior Reporter This is the first story in a three-part series on prescription drug abuse within the community of Mount Pleasant and Central Michigan University. Mount Pleasant is no exception to the nationwide pharmaceutical drug abuse epidemic. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, 12,000 people in the United States died from unintentional overdose on prescription drugs in 2008, most of which were prescribed to treat pain. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that drug overdose death rates had, by 2008, more than tripled since 1990. “America has a bit of a prescription drug problem,” said Officer Mike Covarrubias, a drug recognition expert for the Bay Area Narcotics Enforcement Team. “In 2011, more people were killed by prescription drugs than by street drugs.” At Central Michigan University, the problem occurs when students share prescription drugs with a friend or sell them to others if they have extra. Some of the most common prescriptions abused by students are anxiety medications, which depress the central nervous system and help the user relax. “We hear a lot about Adderall,” Covarrubias said. “Given to children, it calms them down. But in adults, it does the opposite.”
Covarrubias, who is specially trained to see the effects of prescription abuse said the trouble for law enforcement is that in many cases there is nothing for them to measure the severity of the situation. It is also difficult to tell how long or how much a user will be affected by what he or she has taken. “Alcohol you can measure by blowing in a tube,” Covarrubias said. “Pills don’t do that. That’s the difficulty for law enforcement when it comes to drugs.” One of the easiest ways for people to begin abusing their prescription drugs is by adopting a habit Covarrubias terms “doctor shopping,” in which patients request the same prescription from multiple doctors without authorities realizing what is going on. When this happens, it is up to both doctors and pharmacies to report and double check all prescriptions in the Michigan Automated Pre-
scription System, which holds the prescription record of every patient a doctor sees. According to Covarrubias, a drug abuser will go to extraordinary lengths to obtain drugs to feed their habit, even if it means abandoning a job or family. Some will even go so far as to trade Bridge Cards for the drugs they need. Students themselves serve as another avenue for drug abuse. When a university is home to students for many different states, students bring with them the connections they have in other parts of the country. Through these connections, some are able to purchase and transport drugs into the area from buyers in their home state. According to Mount Pleasant Police Public Information Officer Jeff Thompson, students who are first-time or casual users are not the main focus of police officers dealing with drug use. “That street-level user is not the main goal there,” Thompson said. “It’s not the college kid with one ecstasy pill. We want to get to the dealer.” Although police officers are trained to recognize smuggling, Covarrubias said following the trail of drug transportation and putting a stop to it is a constant struggle for law enforcement. Some known borders used for drug trafficking includes the Mexican-Texan border and the one located between Canada and Montana. When it comes to the numbers of students and residents affected by drugs in the Mount Pleasant area, nailing down specifics can be difficult. “I do not have a specific number, but I have experience in talking with specific users,” Covarrubias said. “The overall goal is not about the arrests, it’s about the help.” According to Thompson, help can sometimes be difficult to give to victims of drug abuse, many of whom will slip back into bad habits even after being arrested. “The majority of people who you deal with do not go to rehab,” Thompson said. “We cannot mandate that a person goes to rehab. The courts can mandate it.” Thompson said until a conscious decision to stop using is made, no amount of help provided by police will likely make a long-lasting difference. As a specialist with BAYANET, much of what Covarrubias does is damage control after something has already been abused and an addiction has most likely already formed. “That’s the bummer about being a police officer,” Covarrubias said. “You are reacting. Something has already happened. The only way that you can stop people from using drugs is if you prevent them from starting in the first place.” metro@cm-life.com
Student Government Association representatives might soon be excluded from a top Academic Senate committee if a proposed membership change passes at today’s meeting. The membership amendment directly applies to the A-Senate’s Committee on Committees — a non-policy making committee that helps populate other policy-making committees. Among the proposed changes, the amendment calls for the removal of three seats allocated for SGA representatives appointed to the A-Senate body. The rationale for the removal of student participation cites “a long history of unsuccessful recruitment and poor attendance” from SGA. The implication from A-Senate leadership that SGA has in some way been derelict in its duties has upset Student Government Association President Marie Reimers. “I’m frustrated and tired of the Academic Marie Reimers Senate implying that the SGA drops the ball on these kinds of things,” Reimers said. Filling the seats is difficult when the SGA is unaware of its vacancies, Reimers said. “We were never asked to fill these seats,” she said. “We were not aware of their existence until after we were informed they were going away.” Reimers said SGA only learned about the empty Committee on Committees seats once the proposal landed as an agenda item, becoming aware after SGA Senator and A-Senate member Sandy Lane personally presented the issue to her. The problem she sees, as evidenced by this amendment, is not their attendance record, but rather a severe lack of communication between the faculty government body and its student government counterpart. However, Committee on Committees Chair Roschelle Heuberger, who has chaired the committee seven times over the past several years, said it has been exhausting trying to recruit responsible students who take the committee and its duties seriously. “Student participation is just completely non-existent,” Heuberger said. “In order for me to even just get two-thirds quorum, I need to have every student member there for one meeting, but time and time again, the students might not even show up. I can’t even get a quorum. It has become absolutely tiring for me to have to hunt down students over email just to get a vote — emails that they don’t answer. “This is in no way an anti-student move. It’s to reduce the workload, especially if I have to call a new meeting just to get a vote.” Wherever the blame belongs, Lane said that there is only one way to solve the problem — to get students involved again. “I understand that there have been some legacy issues between (Reimers and her predecessor, Macomb senior Justin Gawronski),” he said. “There was a gap there, and the administration just wasn’t aware of it. It doesn’t matter where the fault lies, though. Let’s just get to work.” w A-SENATE | 2A
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